28th August 2013 Archive

Dell is slimming down and powering up its business laptop line with three new Latitude families running Intel's latest-generation chippery, including a carbon-fiber Series 7000 Ultrabook that the company claims is the most secure in the world.

These are not easy days to be a server maker – and it very likely it'll never be easy again, so we had better get used to it. In the short run, there has probably not been a better time to wrestle with your server vendors on price since the dot-com bust.

Nissan has said it is two car generations away from building mass-market self-driving vehicles, and has promised to have the first hands-free automobiles available for sale within the next seven years.

Why does a game console need billions more transistors than an Itanium?

Microsoft has revealed details of the chip powering its soon-to-be-released Xbox One – and it's one big ol' mofo. How big? Does a 363mm2 footprint – using a 28-nanometer process, no less – filled with five billion transistors impress you?

Look into my eyes, not around the eyes, don't look around my eyes, you're under

Accurate eye-to-eye contact in a videoconference, a feature of high end systems as well as any phone or tablet with a front-facing camera, is a problem for laptop users, because the camera is almost slightly off-direction from the image.

Fusion-io appears to have noticed that competitors are using flash to accelerate virtual desktops and decided it wants a piece of that action too. It has tweaked its acquired ioTurbine flash caching software to produce ioVDI – and get those virtual desktop doggies rolling.

Berlin boffins have spotted a procedural flaw in the long-lived GSM protocol and created an exploit around it which can knock out a mobile network or even target an individual subscriber in the same city.

Pimoroni is without doubt one of the most colourful companies to have come to market in support of the growing community of Raspberry Pi fans. The firm shot to fame last year when it released Pibow, one of the first cases for the Pi.

The UK's data protection watchdog was not justified in serving a monetary penalty on a Scottish council over an allegedly flawed outsourcing arrangement it had with a data disposal contractor, an Information Rights Tribunal has ruled.

The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) specification is 30 years old this month and it's still on version 1.0. More to the point, it still works – with more people using it than ever. In this interview, Dave Smith talks about MIDI past, present and future.

E-book reader-cum-tablet has about million more pixels than the Retina iPad

Kobo has got in ahead of rival Amazon’s anticipated Kindle refresh to update its own line of reading-centric fondleslabs and e-readers: among them is a ten-incher with a monster 2560 x 1600 resolution - that's bigger than many a desktop monitor here in Vulture Central.

Former Fusion-io CEO David Flynn's new venture, Primary Data, appears to have joined up with Tonian, an enterprise storage startup with expertise in parallel Network File System (pNFS) – but whether the move is formal or not remains a mystery.

Quantum is still chewing on its $15m royalty payout from Microsoft, but that was a one-off, and it needs to make plans if it doesn't wish to go hungry again. To that end, the storage firm is adding a dash of Simpana software to boost the growth of its Lattus object storage business.

The new Sparc M6 processor, unveiled at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University this week, makes a bold statement about Oracle's intent to invest in very serious big iron and go after Big Blue in a big way.

Weapons enthusiasts have been experimenting with 3D-printed guns for months, with mixed results. But NASA has set its sights much higher – quite literally – having successfully tested 3D-printed parts under the torturous conditions of rocket engines.

Here is how the cloud infrastructure market works: you can compete with Amazon Web Services and commit yourself to punishing capital expenditures as you build out your data centers, or you can try and come up with a service that does something Amazon doesn't, and charge a premium for it.

It's taken as gospel by businesses – particularly in the technology industry – that when it comes to manufacturing, offshoring production to Asia is the only way to go. But a Moto X teardown by analyst house IHS shows this to be faulty logic.

In an announcement that's going to be a boon to the tin-foil haberdashery business, scientists at the University of Washington (UW) have successfully built a non-invasive system to remotely control the actions of humans.

A couple of security researchers have set spines shivering in the cloud world by demonstrating that Dropbox's obfuscated code can be reverse-engineered, along the way capturing SSL data from the service's cloud and bypassing the two-factor authentication used to secure user data.

It's taken five years, but New Zealand's parliament has finally passed its long-awaited patent reform, which among other things makes it clear that a bit of code isn't enough to attract patent protection.